POLAND. 1948. Teresa, a child in a residence for disturbed children, grew up in a concentration camp. She drew a picture of “home” on the blackboard.
(via pill)
Nice @belfercenter Q&A with climate/energy maven David Keith. Here’s one of many smart thoughts: Q. Why have humans failed so spectacularly to curb greenhouse gas emissions so far – and is there is a no-turning-back deadline regarding global warming?
I don’t know. One answer may lie in the fact that language of environmental advocacy has become increasingly technocratic. Calls for action often stress quantitative measures and self-interest. We are urged to protect the natural environments because of the “ecosystem services” they yield. These arguments have merit, but I suspect they obscure much of what actually drives people’s choices. If we are protecting a rain forest because it stores carbon or yields wonder drugs, then we should be happy to cut down the forest if some carbon storage machine or molecular biotech lab can better provide these services. The utilitarian benefits of the natural world are real, but for me they are a grossly insufficient measure of its value. While I may be an extreme, I think I am not alone, and I suspect that a more directly value-driven conversation about climate might be more effective than the current debate.
The NYT published its Snow Fall project this week. (You’ve seen it, right?) It’s a large, immersive and complex multimedia storytelling piece by more than a dozen people. I had zero (zilch, none, undefined) to do with it, but I do have a blog, and Jeremy White, one of the folks responsible…
"Stereotypes about black female criminality and irresponsibility legitimate the massive disruption that both systems inflict on black families and communities. A popular mythology promoted over centuries portrays black women as unfit to bear and raise children. The sexually licentious Jezebel, the family-demolishing Matriarch, the devious Welfare Queen, the depraved pregnant crack addict accompanied by her equally monstrous crack baby—all paint a picture of a dangerous motherhood that must be regulated and punished. Unmarried black women represent the ultimate irresponsible mothers—women who raises their children without the supervision of a man. These stereotypes do not simply percolate in some disembodied white psyche. They are reinforced and recreated by foster care and prison, which leave the impression that black women are naturally prone to commit crimes and abuse their children. Stereotypes of maternal irresponsibility created and enforced by the child welfare system’s disproportionate supervision of black children help to sustain mass incarceration, and stereotypes of black female criminality help to sustain foster care. As Angela Davis observes, the prison–industrial complex “relies on racialized assumptions of criminality—such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns.” The joint production of stereotypes in the child welfare and prison systems helps to explain why juvenile justice authorities send black delinquents to juvenile detention while referring white delinquents to informal alternatives for the same offenses. Many officials think that all black children come from female-headed households that are ill equipped to handle a troubled child simply because their mothers are not married. Because they perceive black single mothers as incapable of providing adequate supervision of their children, officials believe they are justified in placing these children under state control."
—
Dorothy E. Roberts, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers”
This is just a tiny snippet of the conclusion, but if you have a chance to read the whole thing please do. The full text pdf is at the source.
(via thetart)
(via cleanerlight)
"I will have an undergraduate class, let’s say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: ‘I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.’ In that situation - it’s peculiar, because I am in the position of power and their teacher and, on the other hand, I am not a bourgeois white male - I say to them: ‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?’ Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position-since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak. […] From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework- “I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident” - that is the much more pernicious position. In one way, you take a risk to criticize, of criticizing something which is Other - something which you used to dominate. I say that you have to take a certain risk: to say “I won’t criticize” is salving your conscience, and allowing you not to do any homework. On the other hand, if you criticize having earned the right to do so, then you are indeed taking a risk and you will probably be made welcome, and can hope to be judged with respect."
—
Gayatri Spivak interviewed by Sneja Gunew. ‘Questions of Multiculturalism.’ in The Post-Colonial Critic. p. 62-3.
(via voguedissent)
j-b: I had the chance to see Spivak give a talk at UCLA a couple years ago and she told this wonderful anecdote about how she would sometimes, in all-white settings, make a joke along the lines of, ‘in my culture, we respect people who interrupt others’ when she was interrupting a speaker. And, to her chagrin and amusement, saying that was often enough to secure her the floor to speak.
And what I took from that anecdote is that Spivak wins forever.
(via james-bliss)
I feel like I scream this inside my head so much that it might explode.
(via blackraincloud)
(Source: fearandwar, via cleanerlight)
This year, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been struggling for re-authorization because Republicans have been blocking sections that create policy specific to supporting Native, immigrant, and LGBT survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Specifically, these…
List by Tom Giesen, an adjunct professor at University of Oregon. I edited it down some, for the entire post, visit here. I’ll add that, generally, I personally cannot see how we’re going stop the climate from changing. Too many people in the world are starting to want - and get - TVs, laptops, cars, and a single family home. Who are we to deny them?
1. Delayed consequences. Warming is a current phenomenon, but most of the damage is in the future, like a time-delayed bomb – we emit now and suffer the consequences later. Because it is a future event, neither citizens nor politicians feel sufficient urgency.
2. Belief in the necessity of growth! The sanctity of growth in the economy and in population is the real American religion. What all cities/communities want is more economic and population growth. But growth is now impossible without cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and they are finite and becoming prohibitively expensive – causing recessions.
3. Energy cornucopia! The “booms” in oil and gas are mostly just Wall Street bubbles like the real estate and internet bubbles of recent years. Conventional (cheap) fossil fuels are declining resources, and fracked, deep water, oil sands and arctic sources are prohibitively expensive. But no matter – the press is still full of empty chatter about the US out-producing Saudi Arabia and being energy independent.
4. Individualism. Devotees of individualism dislike cooperative processes, preferring go-it-alone methods. Cutting emissions requires a globally cooperative effort, and such cooperative projects might feel to individualists like unacceptable collectivism, and hence resisted.
5. Anti-intellectualism. Many in America have not moved beyond medieval science. Rationality does not often apply in scientific issues with political overtones, or with personal preferences, and hence global warming, the end of cheap oil, and other issues are falsely labeled as scientific frauds by opponents of science.
6. American exceptionalism. We imagine we are different from other nations, and many Americans accept that we are not subject to the same rules as other nations.
7. Failure of international cooperation. It is nearly universally believed that the solution to the problem of warming lies in global treaties involving all nations and dealing with emissions reductions and related equity/financial issues. It’s now 25 years since James Hansen warned Congress, and we have done nothing. Nothing.
8. Difficulties of monitoring and assuring compliance. How do you closely monitor emissions of a gas which quickly diffuses globally in the atmosphere? How do you closely monitor all production and use of fossil fuels? How do you monitor and control land use change (deforestation) before the deed is done? Etc.
9. Greed. Greed permeates political life: worldwide, governments’ subsidies to fossil fuel producers now total $100,000,000,000 a year, and subsidies to consumers are $675,000,000,000. The subsidies are like crack cocaine – the addiction is extremely difficult to treat.
10. Disinformation. The fossil fuel industry lavishly funds global warming deniers and skeptics – the “lavish” funding is chump change in view of current profits.
If we follow the path we are on, the path of no cutting back on emissions, and in fact the path of continued increases in the rate of increase of emissions, our civilization will very possibly collapse.
"I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
— Thomas Jefferson (via kateoplis)
The Cave of Crystals
Nearly 1,000ft below the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico, this cave was discovered by two brothers drilling in the Naica lead and silver mine. It is an eerie sight.
Up to 170 giant, luminous obelisks - the biggest is 37.4ft long and the equivalent height of six men - jut across the grotto like tangled pillars of light; and the damp rock of their walls is covered with yet more flawless clusters of blade-sharp crystal.
They are formed from groundwater saturated in calcium sulphate which, warmed by an intrusion of magma about a mile below, began filtering through the cave system millions of years ago.
When, about 600,000 years ago, the magma began to cool, the minerals started to precipitate out of the water, and over the centuries the tiny crystals they formed grew and grew until 1985, when miners unwittingly drained the cave as they lowered the water table with mine pumps.
Because the crystals resemble giant icicles, the picture suggests it must be very cold inside the Cave of Crystals - but appearances can be deceptive.
In fact, the temperature is a sweltering 112F, with a humidity of 90-100 per cent.
This is why cavers wear protective suits and carry backpacks of ice-cooled air.So amazing. A non-biological thing that “wants” to grow.
On Tuesday we published our second story, Electric Shock — a piece about the work of a pioneering researcher who has found a new angle on regenerative medicine. It was written by Cynthia Graber, edited by Seth Mnookin, and Seth has written a beautiful piece outlining some of his reasons…
